A computer outage at the company's Atlanta headquarters on Monday caused the cancellation of 1,800 flights over two days. Then 250 more flights were canceled Wednesday as severe weather threatened flights along the east coast.

Bloomberg's Michael Sasso and Thomas Black reported Tuesday that the computer failure could dent Delta's third-quarter earnings by as much as 10%. Sasso and Black also said the problem served as a wake-up call for the airline industry and for airlines' outdated computer systems.

But this issue goes much broader than the airline industry: Capital investment is a problem for all of corporate America.

A look into business investment trends makes clear that corporate America is dropping the ball on things like, in the case of Delta, upgrading outdated computer systems that can cause massive delays.

Neil Dutta, an economist at Renaissance Macro, noted last month that investment in equipment and structures fell during the second quarter while research-and-development spending rose at an annualized rate of 4.8%. R&D spending accounted for 1.8% of GDP, a record.

And so there is clearly some appetite for spending from US businesses; it is just that this spending is not addressing the problem of existing structures, equipment, and technologies that need upgrading.

On Tuesday we learned that nonfarm productivity in the US fell 0.5%, the third straight quarter worker in which output has fallen.

And since Robert Gordon's zeitgeist-defining "The Rise and Fall of American Growth" — which argues that US productivity will simply be lower going forward because innovations like running water, microwave ovens, and air transportation (among thousands of other advances that raise the standard of living) can happen only once — worries about a future of low US productivity, and thus a slower increase in the standard of living, abound.

In a note to clients on Wednesday, Dutta argued that running the economy hot, when workers become scarce and increased efficiencies are required to maintain growth, is one way to goose productivity.

This chart from Dutta outlines how a lack of quality labor has often been followed by an increase in productivity.

Renaissance Macro

Another way to increase productivity, as Dutta highlighted along with the July 29 GDP release, is to increase capital spending. R&D numbers already portend a future of increased productivity.

More computer problems like what we saw from Delta earlier this week could encourage businesses to fill in the missing piece of their capital-spending puzzle.